


Step Back Through Time

by FFFantasies



Category: Filthy Frank Show - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Podfic Length: 1-1.5 Hours, Podfic now included
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 07:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11642031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FFFantasies/pseuds/FFFantasies
Summary: Sometimes a story isn't just snapshots of when we were together, sometimes a story doesn't start at the beginning or end at the end, sometimes a story doesn't even start with the people it's about but that doesn't mean we can't have something happy to remember.





	Step Back Through Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically the other side of Remember My Touch, some of the events from that are referenced here but only in passing the same way events and characters here were referenced there.

Podfic: [Step Back Through Time](https://soundcloud.com/robin-shi-174708089/step-back-through-time)

 

Sometimes she wonders if he was always there, always a part of her life and didn’t just show up when she was twelve and visiting her grandparents for the first time. Sometimes Isabella thinks it was faith, other times she thinks he organized it, arranged it and made sure it happened and she doesn’t know how to feel about that.

Sometimes she wonders if it matters, whether or not he’s always been following her, watching her, learning her life. Does it? She isn’t sure, she doesn’t know and that’s…well it’s not okay but it isn’t wrong either. She loves him, she loves him now and she isn’t afraid to say that and he loves her too, she knows he does even if it’s stupid to take something like him at face value. He’s not human, he’s not nice, he doesn’t care about anything but himself but she knows he loves her, he’s proved it over and over and over again and she loves him too.

He’s been with her since she was twelve at least, he’s been with her since she was a slack jawed kid look at him prowl around a dark yard. He’s followed her ever since he looked her dead in the eye with the ones he was missing and pressed a finger to his lips, leaving a secret in her hands and disappearing over the fence. He’s been with her longer than she’s been a **_her_** and sometimes that makes her feel strange too but not in a bad way.

She knows if she called him right now, stopped breathing in nicotine and took a few seconds to whisper his name between the smoke that he’d show up. He always does, he’s stronger than the other spirits, always has been and he can go wherever he wants whenever he wants and most of the time he wants to visit her. She knows all she has to do is trace the tattoo on her hip, the one of an eye, the one with a half moon, the one he never asked her to get, to call him.

Isabella isn’t a fool, she’s naïve maybe but she’s not stupid. She knows she’s in deep with a world she doesn’t entirely understand but she knows enough to keep herself safe. She doesn’t need to but she can, she has him but she has herself too.

“Chin Chin,” she sighs, whispers his name so quietly it’s barely a sound, feels his name brush her lips like the smoke curling around her tongue. She breathes deep, looks out at the empty street through her kitchen window and lets ash fall into the kitchen sink. She could count the seconds if she wanted, could count her heartbeats and never reach ten but she doesn’t. She closes her eyes and breathes as deep as she can, feels it fill up her lungs.

“Hi,” she murmurs as she breathes out, as cool hands curl around her hips, as a sturdy body appears at her back, as a chin drops on her shoulder. Eight years and she’s still not used to this, to having him always available to her, she doubt she ever will be.

“Ore wa,” he tells her and she knows it doesn’t mean anything, not really, not hi, or her name, or even I love you. She doesn’t need to hear it though, doesn’t need him to say the words in a language he only speaks for her because she can feel it. In the fingers pressing against her hips, in the soft breaths brushing against her cheek, in the way he stands so close but never crowds her.

“O Chin Chin,” he says as she brings the cigarette back to her lips and sucks another breath of it into her lungs. She doesn’t care if he manipulated her into loving him, as bad as that sounds, she doesn’t care because she’s selfish and she’s just glad he somehow fell for her too, that somehow she made him love her too. She’s selfish and she wants him all to herself, she’s selfish and she’s viciously proud to be the first one to make him feel this way about some other living thing.

She revels in the feeling of having him there, of having him whenever she wants. She smiles sharp and nasty when his lips brush her jaw in a soft kiss, such a soft, gentle thing. She’s the only one that gets this, the only one to ever have this and she’s the only one who ever will.

-0-

He never meant to knock her into Franklin, as much as he hates Francis, he doesn’t really care about Franklin. Franklin is strange, an oddity in an omniverse full of shit that shouldn’t exist, Franklin is interesting and always has been and Chin Chin never meant to kill him. He doesn’t know if he feels bad about it, even after actually spending time thinking about it, he doesn’t know how he feels about Franklin’s death.

It’s strange to travel through Dead Realms and halfway realms and not sense him there, Francis’ strange kin. It’s strange not hearing him laughing with his human, it’s strange not hearing about his tragic little romance from the gossips at a bathhouse, it’s strange not running into him at the train stations he could never use. It’s strange to know Franklin is dead after so many chromosomes of surviving, fighting, existing; it’s strange and almost wrong but he can’t do anything about it.

Chin Chin is a God but he can’t rip apart the veil and snatch a spirit back from beyond it. There are rules, even for Gods, and there always have been. Still, prowling around his realm, sloughing off the skin he wears to appear just a little less unearthly and stalking through the grasses, he feels a strange sense of obligation. Scenting around the Temple steps is useless but he does it anyway, running his fingers over the grass there is pointless but he still does it, listening to the wind sighing quietly won’t do anything but it doesn’t stop him from listening hard.

He’s heard all the rumours about it, he was there when it happened but he still never feels like he got the full story. He wants to know what Franklin’s mortal felt when he saw the spirit disappearing, he wants to know how Franklin’s human feels now, he wants the answers to a question he doesn’t know. He wants to tell Isabella about the spirit her little friend fell in love with, her summer friend who rooms with her brother now.

Won’t though, won’t ever. He never wants her to know she killed a spirit, that she killed someone who meant so much to her friend and turned away without a care. He thinks it’s selfish keeping this from her, not telling her what she’s done and why some spirits shy away from her when he brings her along. He knows it’s cruel never letting her apologise to her friend but he doesn’t give two single fucks, she’s his, his girl and he never wants her to hurt. He’s hers and he’ll take care of her, he will, she’s the one thing he’s ever wanted like this and he’ll never let her go.

How long has it been for Franklin’s mortal? Two years? Two years to come to terms with this? Two years to reconcile thirteen? Two years to find someone else, someone human? He never asks her but Isabella tells him anyway, tells him what her brother told her, what her brother’s friend told her about Franklin’s little mortal. He doesn’t remember the names, never cares to, but he knows Franklin’s mortal is seeing someone now, someone new, a woman if he remembers.

Some woman who makes him smile, some woman who leaves lipstick kisses on his cheek, who helps him remember which realm he belongs to. And is it hypocritical to say that? Think that? To be glad Franklin’s human isn’t running around with spirits as much anymore when he goes to Isabella whenever she so much as whispers his name? When she brushes her fingers over the tattoo he never asked her to get but loves that she has anyway?

Probably, nearly definitely, but he doesn’t care. Franklin’s romance was doomed from the start, never able to touch, never able to interact with the technological realm, never anything more than summer sunshine and laughter. Chin Chin thinks…knows that watching his human grow up, grow old, die, would have broken Franklin, left him worse off than before, left him vengeful and bitter. Is this better? In the long run, yes but right now, when it’s still fresh and still bleeding, no. No.

Right now, he’ll take his hypocrisy. Right now, he’ll go when Isabella whispers his name and he’ll hold her tight and close the way Franklin’s mortal never got.

* * *

 

She breathes as deep as she can as slow as she can and smiles when cool fingers trace over her eyelids. She can smell the grass, thick and green and so grassy, and she can smell flowers somewhere, sweet and light. She cracks her eyes open and can’t see anything but the pin prick stars blazing away in the black sky, can make out the darker blob of trees against the sky but nothing else. She can’t hear anything but the wind shushing through the grass, no animals, nothing but her own breathing and his in this dark realm.

This one is his, his Realm, she knows it is without him having to tell her. She doesn’t know how she does, maybe it’s something in the air that smells like him, maybe it’s something thrumming in the earth that reminds her of his voice. She doesn’t know what about it feels like him, what exactly but she doesn’t mind. There’s so much she doesn’t mind about him, not the sharp rows of shark teeth, not the too many hands, not even the blank, black holes where his eyes should be.

She never did find out what kind of spirit he was, why he had a shrine or a Temple or why all the other spirits are so afraid of him. She doesn’t know why he can look completely inhuman when none of the rest of them can, what that means he is if he can just rip out of the black skin and be something she can’t understand. The trees rock with a breeze, the grasses ripple with it and she can only just make out the blobs of them all but she knows if he was standing as tall as he could, he would be over the tree tops.

Oh he’d take up half the sky, more than half. He’d be all she could see, even if she couldn’t exactly see him, she doesn’t think anyone can because that’s not how it works. He’s smoke and shadow and darkness, a dark god maybe, he’s something so much more than everything else around him. Even in this realm that’s pitch black except for the stars so far above, he’s so much more than it and so much more than she could ever understand.

“That’s okay though,” she mumbles to herself and he shifts his hold on her, moves over just enough to make sure she doesn’t touch the grass. She doesn’t know if there’s anything in this realm that could hurt her, if it’s all pitch black darkness and silence, if there are things in the forest or poison in the ground. He would never let anything hurt her, she knows he wouldn’t, but she can’t help but wonder sometimes, just what he’s protecting her from.

He carried her here, through the trees so thick he had to push them away with his too many hands, breaking them when they wouldn’t bend. She’d never heard a more silent forest before, in all of the realms he’d taken her, none of them had been so quiet, and it should have been eerie, oppressive maybe but she didn’t feel like it was. Somehow the sound of branches snapping and breaking and the sound of underbrush being trampled and the sound of her own voice was enough to make it okay.

Or maybe Chin Chin made it okay.

“You do,” she agrees and he laughs, he has no idea what kind of conversation she’s having with herself or why she’s saying any of the shit she is, but he laughs anyway. She feels it under ear, feels it shake his entire body and feels it deep into her bones, it’s deeper than any bass. She hears it too of course, deep and guttural, closer to a roar than a laugh or a human laugh at least, and it should send chills down her spine.

Fuck she should be frozen in fear right now but she isn’t, she hasn’t been for a long time now. She laughs with him instead, loud and higher pitched than him, she even snorts because well, who’s here to judge her? Who’s here to mock her for not sounding the way they expect, for snorting when she laughs, for shouting?

Who’d have the balls with her dark god around?

-0-

He doesn’t really remember what he used to do with the summer months before she showed up, before he felt her eyes on him as he prowled around the yard. He knows he had to have done something but he doesn’t think it was that important if he can’t remember, maybe he terrorized some realm or the other. Maybe he fucked around with Francis though he hasn’t visited Francis’ realm in a long time, they’ve fought the same fight so many times it’s boring now.

He knows he could go to her, right now, right this second, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to crowd her, doesn’t want to steal too much of her time unless she asks for it and besides, he’ll have her all summer as always. Another human year, another summer full of her; her voice, her smell, her taste, her touch warm and sweet and if he’s lucky, he can take her to the Temple again and see her.

How long has he been stalking this pretty little mortal? How many of her years? He doesn’t remember, he’s never had to track his time in human years before but he knows it’s been a while. Knows that she’s forgotten what she did with her summers before him too because she’s told him and he’s proud of that, feels pathetic for it but still proud. She’s incredible, beautiful to him, and he wonders how long he can keep her.

Franklin makes him wonder if he can keep her, if there’s an expiration date on him having her. As he slips from realm to realm, from halfway forest to dead plain, from lush rainforest to softly swaying fields. He wonders. As he notices Franklin’s mortal visiting his ruined Temple in the daytime when all the spirits who ever spend their nights in revelry are gone. He notices the mortal there often, in the week between getting to Tomi’s and Isabella showing up, the mortal visits every single day.

Chin Chin wonders about Tomi too, if she’ll ever tell her ‘nephew’ who she is to him and what his father used to do. She has an expiration date and it’s one he knows, Misaki had his own expiration date and it’s already past, both of them made their deals and one of them has already paid. He wonders if he can convince her to make another deal, if she’s willing to give up even more for more time, most humans are.

She’s already sold away any family she could have had in exchange for the life she thought she wanted, the life she lives on and off nowadays. Maybe she’ll sell away something more for the time she wants with her nephew though the boy is more like a son to her. He supposes she got around that little loophole nicely though she can never truly be his mother and it pains her every year. Every year she sees him grow and every year she can’t tell him the things she wants to, every year she lets him think he’s slipping away without her knowing.

Humans are curious things, most of them confusing and irritating, but there are a few who’re interesting and there’s only ever been one who captivated him. She’s due in another few hours, on a plane high in the sky right now and he almost tips his face up though he’s in a completely different realm to her. The sound of water crashing and flowing and racing itself would cover any sound her plane would have made anyway. The distant scream of ‘nyes!’ and excited laughter would have drowned out her voice anyway.

He crawls into a tree instead, gets high over the rest of the swampy, marshy plain and listens to the sounds of spirts and lycras playing together. They don’t sense him, they never do, and he’s free to get as close as he wants though he stays in the tree that’s far enough to make their conversations a nice murmur no louder than the water. He listens to them, counts out the three people splashing around under the mangrove roots and counts down the time until his girl gets home.

* * *

 

He takes her to the Luxury Realm, he takes her to the Pussy Realm, he even shows her his own Realm, the one he was born in for lack of a better word. He shows her everything he can think of to make her happy, to hear her laugh in wonder or squeal from excitement. He knows she’ll he starting something, doing something new when the summer ends and she goes back to the life she has without him. He doesn’t know much about the technological realm, he wanted to own it once but that was so long ago, he doesn’t care what it does anymore.

Still she’s from there and something is going to happen there and he knows she’s worried about it. Not the same way she’s been worried in the past, close to screaming, close to breaking things and herself if she couldn’t find release that way. She’s a giddy kind of worried, an almost hysterical kind of worried where he’s not sure if she’s going to start laughing her heart out or screaming herself hoarse. She’s so emotional and for once it doesn’t irritate him, nothing about her could he thinks but still, she feels things so intensely.

She feels and she feels and he wants her to feel only good things these months she spends with him. Maybe that’s why he decides to bring her to the Temple, his Temple, maybe he decides to take her there because he wants to finally see her, after so many years of having everything else about her, he wants this last thing. He has his eyes there, carved into the crumbling walls, painted onto the pocked pillars, he can see there and only there and he wants to take her there.

He waits though, waits until the last few days, one of the last few nights she’ll be close by and able to come to him. He waits until the moon is waning, fading away into the sky and the space between the realms is as wide as any river before he wades through it. He slips through as slick as a shadow, crawls over the fence that’s so much more than wood and metal, and into the yard he first met her in.

Another mortal is awake as he slips through but he recognises that one, Franklin’s little toy, and he doesn’t care as he sneaks into the house and snatches up his prize. He takes her with him, shushes her when she asks where they’re going and carries her on his back, back through the realms. He carries her, laughing and giggling, smiling bright and wide when she kisses his neck, when she hugs him tight and says she loves him.

“O Chin Chin,” he tells her as the Temple comes into view, he knows she doesn’t understand him, but she doesn’t mind, she never has. She gasps and squeals, calls it a club and asks him to put her down so she can walk with him instead of being carried. And he does because he’s never denied her anything, holding her hand as he leads through the crowd of spirits, so many of them have waited so long for this special waning moon and they’re ready to lose themselves to the revelry.

Isabella is a human and even she can feel it, she dances as she walks, giggles loudly when a hysterical shriek rips through the air and almost falls over herself as they climb the broken stairs. She falls into someone, tells them to fuck off and giggles again as he takes both of her hands and pulls her into the Temple with him. He almost misses it, almost ignores it, but he hears her name, hears someone call to her and he tips his head towards it.

He isn’t sure what he’s hearing, underneath the shouting and screaming and laughter, he hears a whispered I love you and he hears something soft falling on the grass. He smells something sharp, something like incense and something like a forest fire eating everything in its path but at the same time not. He doesn’t understand what he’s hearing, what he’s smelling, he thinks he should but he can’t, it’s something familiar but he can’t remember from where.

“Can we dance?” Isabella asks and he immediately gets distracted by her, caught up in her voice, caught up in the sound of her heart ticking up. He smiles at her, smiles with more teeth than he means to, smiles in a way that’s predatory even though he doesn’t mean to but it’s just what he is. He half worries she’ll drop his hands, cringe away, fall over her feet scrambling away from him, most usually do when he smiles at them like something ready to eat them whole but she doesn’t.

She shifts her grip to his wrists and tugs him towards her, moves his hands to her back, just above the swell of her ass and reaches up for his face. She drags him in close, one hand on his neck, the other on his cheek; she pulls him in, pulls him down to her and kisses him. She kisses him and he forgets everything else but her.

He forgets everything but the taste of her mouth, everything but the feeling of her lips moving against his. He loses himself in the feeling of her pressed against him, in the soft little sigh hears just as much as he feels, the quiet little moan he tastes just as much as he hears. He holds her, he cradles her against him, makes a few hands just to push away anyone who gets too close for his liking. No one else is allowed close, he even drops shadows over the whole Temple, kills the lights because if he can’t see then neither can they.

When she pulls away, he follows her, desperate for more, whines low in his throat because he wants more. When she pulls away he remembers, remembers why he brought her here at all and lifts the shadows as sudden as he dropped them. The crowd doesn’t react, well they scream but he can’t tell whether it’s fear or joy or just screaming for the sake of screaming.

“Is-belle,” he breathes, knowing he gets her name wrong, hating that he can’t make himself do this one simple thing for her but she, she shivers against him and hides her face against his chest. He can’t speak her language, can’t tell her how much he adores her in words she’ll understand but she doesn’t care.

-0-

“Chin Chin!” she screams the second he shows up, she throws herself at him and laughs when they both start to fall. They don’t hit the ground though, he hugs her tight and catches them with another pair of hands. She pulls back a little and just laughs harder when she sees the look on his face, half disgruntled, half confused, half happy, she knows she has her fractions off but she doesn’t care. She’s in Japan for the summer and she’s going to the college she’s always wanted and she can finally do whatever the fuck she wants to her hair and she’s happy!

“Ore wa chin chin,” he grumbles but he doesn’t let go, fuck, he spins her around and she laughs again. She has the whole summer to do whatever she wants, to visit himself whenever she wants even though he’s visited her a lot over the last year, whenever she got too stressed to focus on whatever she was doing. This is different though, she doesn’t have to think about school until August at least and it’s fucking June now and fuck she’s happy.

“I love you!” she shouts and kisses him right on the nose because she knows it’ll make him scrunch up his nose and she loves watching it happen. He’s some kind of eldritch monstrosity with three rows of shark teeth and he has a bunch of hands he can manifest at will and he’s the furthest thing from human but he’s so cute sometimes. His tongue snakes out between his shark teeth and licks the tip of his nose where she kissed him and she grins even though he can’t see it and kisses his cheek.

“O Chin Chin!” he says firmly but he still doesn’t put her down, hikes her legs up around his waist instead and starts walking instead. She doesn’t care where they’re going, she’s just glad she gets to go. No one will miss her at home, Mai took Oliver and Bastian to the store with her because she wants them to carry the bags and Stanley was asleep when she left, he’ll still be asleep by the time she gets back. She knows Chin Chin can make time flow different too so she’s not worried about anyone missing her at home, all she cares about is getting to spend time with him.

All she cares about is pressing her face to his shoulder and sighing happily. She’s missed the summers she used to have, back before the divorce and back before her hormones started fucking with her head. She doesn’t hate them but she hates some of the side effects and sure, sure she probably would’ve developed depression anyway because hey, family history but it’s fucky. It’s fucky and it’s been fucky for the last two years and she’s missed her summers.

She doesn’t look up when she feels the shift in temperature, from the warm summer air to something cool and wet and just a little rainy. She hears the instant buzz of a crowd and something bright flashes against her eyelids and she blinks up at a neon sign. Her breath catches in her throat when she looks around and sees huge buildings, huge buildings with huge billboards on them. If she didn’t know better she’d think she was in the middle of Time’s Square or something but no, she does know better.

The advertisements are for tours through the Safari Realm, for restaurants serving things she’s never seen before. There aren’t any tech things, no movies or commercials for tv shows, there are clubs instead, clubs and she swears she sees something that says Pussy Realm. The people aren’t human either, she sees a bunch of people walking around in full body suits, every colour of the rainbow. She sees people walking around on all fours, she sees beautiful people with eyes that reflect the light, she sees shadows and the outline of people walking around unattached to anyone person she can find.

“Welcome to the Luxury Realm Casino!” A voice shouts and she nearly jumps out of his arms because it’s so loud, wow fuck, it’s loud. She looks around, glances over the crowd of people she’d need a metaphor about rainbows to describe and over the billboards flashing bright enough to give someone a seizure before she finds the place. A huge building made up of glass, every floor flashing a different colour and she guesses speakers too because she can hear the sound of slot machines and roulette wheels even though they’re moving away from it.

“Where anyone can be a winner!” The voice continues and she guesses it’s part of a spiel and she guesses this is the luxury realm. Chin Chin’s never brought her here before but she guesses he’s been here before because the crowd gives him space to move, instinctively moving away from him she guesses. She can’t understand what any of them are saying and she’s sure none of them are speaking English but it’s easy to guess it’s about her.

She’ll never know how spirits figure out she’s not one of them, if there’s a smell or something, if there’s a glow only they can see but they always do. Whenever Chin Chin takes her somewhere with other spirits, they always look at her and she knows it’s her they’re looking at because Chin Chin always snarls at them and they look away instantly. She wonders what they’re saying now though, if they’re wondering who she is and why Chin Chin is carrying her or if they know who she is and want to know what she’s doing here.

She’s been running around with Chin Chin for years now but it’s always a surprise when he snarls, when he does something so completely inhuman it makes her heart jump. And he does, he growls at the people around them, the whispering ones, and they all go completely silent. Some of them turn around and start running, some of them freeze where they are and slowly fade away before her eyes and she’s nearly entirely sure one of them throws up a peace sign as it does.

“Come and try your luck or be left asking what the fuck! The choice is yours!” is the only thing she can hear other than her own laughter as Chin Chin keeps walking. Fuck she’s missed this.

* * *

 

 “Can you kill me next?” she asks on the upswing and watches him fall away as she falls back again. She doesn’t know which realm this is, if it’s one just full of giant animals and monsters or if there are people around somewhere. If there are people, they’ve got some huge balls living in this place and she feels a strange sense of respect for them, whoever they are, if they even exist.

“O Chin Chin,” he answers without even tipping his head towards her and she sticks her tongue out at him. Two hands push against her lower back and she goes flying through the air again, hair flying as the swing creaks and sounds ready to break any second. She wonders if he’ll catch her with those detached hands of his if it does and she falls or if he’ll actually get up and do it himself. She entertains the idea of him not catching her at all for a few seconds, of hitting the ground hard and breaking something, maybe her neck before she forgets it, he never would.

He’s busy skinning the huge thing he killed, something with too many legs and lots of fluffy fur. She thinks it could be a bear-tiger hybrid but there’s something wrong about the head, looks a little too doggish, she wonders if this thing even has a name. He brought her to this realm, waited until she sat her ass down on the rusty as swing set and started rocking before he disappeared off to wherever.

She knows he was still close by because the hands pushing her never stopped, never stopped, not even when whatever the hell the thing he’s skinned started to scream. High pitched and grating on her ears, she’d scrunched her nose and kicked her legs harder, even though they ached so much these days. Her doctor had warned her about this shit but it was still a bitch and a half, specially when she came out to these different realms and spent so much time walking. Oh sure Chin Chin would carry her around if she asked him but she didn’t like asking, she could walk on her own thanks.

Now she’s just letting her legs just dangle while he pushes her, while he skins his thingy that she thinks he ripped the throat out of with his own teeth. She thinks that should scare her maybe, that she’s running around with something that could kill her easy as blinking even if it doesn’t blink but she doesn’t really care. If he wanted to get rid of her, he would have done it a long, long time ago, instead he comes and gets her and takes her on adventures through strange places.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asks after a while, after he slits the thing open from crotch to throat and sends the innards spilling out on the ground. She squints at the orange-ish blood, technically it’s still a shade of red but blood really shouldn’t be that shade of red. The smell is also weird, not the fresh smell of dead animal she’s used to, this is earthier, almost musky she thinks but she’s kind of bad at picking out smells.

He doesn’t answer her this time, well verbally at least, he shoves his hand that’s actually attached to his body into the creature and pulls out what she’s nearly sure is the heart. She scrunches her nose as he sniffs at the heart, makes a disgusted noise in her throat when he licks it and rolls her eyes when he takes a bite out of it. She watches him chew, out exaggerated might she add, before swallowing and turning to her with a grin.

His teeth are stained with the orange-red blood, sharp and glinting in the evening light. She stares back at him unimpressed, knows he was trying to gross her out maybe but she doesn’t really give a shit. She’s seen him kill things before, more humanoid things, things that tried to snatch her as she waited by his shrine and she wasn’t scared then either. Something about watching him tear something to shreds, something about hearing him growl and snarl and roar like an animal makes her feel safe. It really shouldn’t, it’s fucked that it does but she can’t help herself, he makes her feel safe.

“O Chin Chin?” he offers, she thinks he offers, as he holds the heart out to her. She waits until she’s on the back swing and the hands are ready to catch and push before she grabs one. She grabs it and flings it back at him, knows he could stop it before it smacks him in the face but laughs when he doesn’t. She knows half of what he does is to make her laugh, to indulge her and make her happy and she wants to be mad that he does shit like that but she’s just flattered he even bothers. He makes her feel special, and she thinks she is special because he isn’t like this with anyone else.

She’s special.

“Fuck off!” she shouts and he just shrugs, takes another bite of his heart and grins at her.

 -0-

He…isn’t sure how to handle this. He’s never had to before, never had anyone to care about before so he’s very confused and very concerned now.

“Fuck!” Isabella hisses again and he hears something breaking, something glass. He stands outside the room, hides in the shadows and wonders what to do. She said his name, he heard her all the way across the realms and he came, he’ll always come when she calls but he doesn’t know what to do now. He thinks she called him by accident.

He’s stood outside the bathroom for minutes now, listening to her swear and growl and break things and he doesn’t know what to do. He smells blood and he smells salt and he smells something chemical and harsh.

“Fuck!”

He huffs and looks around, listens around. This is her home, the one in America, the one with the lots of bedrooms and bathrooms and people, too many people. He can hear her father snoring in his sleep, can hear someone in the bed next to him but knows it’s not the man’s recently ex-wife. He can hear the brothers, the eldest is awake and talking quietly to someone on the phone he thinks, the younger one has a person over and the two of them are wrapped up in each other deep asleep.

Can’t they hear her? The house is big but not gigantic, can’t they hear her growling under her breath? He presses a hand to the door, feels the fake wood under his fingers and cocks his head towards her and listens some more. He isn’t sure if walking in on her right now is what she needs or something she would want, he doesn’t know if she wants comfort or someone to listen to her. He doesn’t know if she wants anyone at all.

“Shit! God fucking,” she shouts through gritted teeth and he can smell blood again, there’s not much but it’s there and he wonders what she’s doing. He knows she shaves now, she’s complained about it plenty of times but this sounds different, sounds more like she’s moving around the room more than simply shaving her face would do. He never minded the coarse hair, he liked rubbing his hand against it, rubbing his cheek when he could get away with it but she hates it. Women aren’t supposed to have hair on their faces, he doesn’t understand why but she insists.

“Cunt!” she whispers, less angry now, more exhausted now and he doesn’t know when he made the decision only that he did. Fading through shadows is simply, easy, it helps that the hallway is dark and it helps that she didn’t turn on the light in the bathroom either. The shadows are cool on his face, familiar, and he feels for her with them, uses them to feel everything in the room until he finds her sitting on the closed toilet lid.

“O Chin Chin?” he asks, cocking his head to her and taking careful steps towards her. He knows she doesn’t scare easy, she never has but he doesn’t want her to fling anything at him, or hurt herself if she startles. He feels the shift of her hair around her ears, the brush of it longer than he remembers, and he knows she’s staring straight at him.

He keeps down, stays crouched and sniffs delicately. He can smell the blood underneath the harsh chemical smell, and he can smell the tears wet on her cheeks. She’s crying and he doesn’t know why, she’s bleeding and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know how to ask either, in her language or his own, he’s confused.

“I’m trying to shave and I can’t. My razors are too dull and I ran out of hair removal cream and I have a thing tomorrow and I was going to wear a skirt and it’s stupid as fuck but I just fucking want this!” she groans and he can smell the tears strong and sharp in his nose. He takes another step until he’s crotched next to her, on all fours to seem smaller even though she knows what he is, seen what he is.

“I just wanted to not care for once, but I do, I always care and this always happens and that’s why the fucking call me insecure girl,” she mutters, flinging something and he hears it clatter into the bathtub. He doesn’t know why she cares so much, he loves her, she’s beautiful, she’s gorgeous and he doesn’t need to see her to know it. He doesn’t understand why those who get to don’t realise just how blessed they are.

“Stupid name but it fits,” she sighs, hand dropping to his head and he shifts until his head is against her thigh. She doesn’t say anything else and he doesn’t even try to, he knows this isn’t something she can explain and it’s not something he could understand so they stay silent in the shadows. Together.

* * *

 

“Seriously G, you can’t spend all summer in your room!” Oliver shouts, pounding on the door for a solid minute before he fucks off and she stuffs her head further under her pillow while he does. She’s slept past four every day this month and she’s not breaking the fucking streak now, not a fucking chance. She also refuses to go to any ‘divorce dinner’ Brenda tries to throw, not after everything that happened and not after what that woman said to her.

She’d rather eat another droopy as hell peanut butter sandwich with slightly mouldy bread than go to dinner with Brenda and her new husband and her new step-son with Oliver and Sebastian. She doesn’t even care that it’s been three months since the divorce she didn’t even know was coming and she doesn’t even care it’s been a month since the wedding they didn’t even get invited to. She doesn’t care that she should be good with it if Joe is good with it, she doesn’t care that she should be okay if Oliver and Sebastian are, she doesn’t care that this is normal and that divorces happen.

She cares that her mother left them so easy and she cares that her mother said she was just like her father in all the wrong ways and she cares that her father signed the divorce papers because of her. She feels like she was the deciding factor in the split and she doesn’t want to be, she knows she wasn’t the reason they actually fucking split because this has been going on for years. Brenda, not mom, never mom, is the one that started sending all her kids off to Japan ever summer and Joe never said anything against it but Isabella knows he never liked it.

She knows that her parents have never been what anyone could call loving and she knows that they haven’t slept in the same bed for nearly two years now. She knows too much sometimes and she knows if she waits another five minutes, she’ll have the whole house to herself. She can do anything she wants then and that’s when she can scream and shout and punch the walls until she splits her knuckles. She knows Joe always waits a few minutes after Brenda comes to get Oliver and Bastian before he leaves too and she knows he won’t bother to tell her anything.

Maybe it should bother her more than it does, he’s her dad and she loves him but, well, sometimes she doesn’t care. She knows he’s keeping secrets, more than just **_how_** he’s here dad, more than why he doesn’t visit his parents with them, but she’s keeping secrets too so it doesn’t bother her as much. Not when him leaving lets her leave too. She thinks sometimes that he knows what she’s been doing over the summers, who she’s been seeing, but he’s never said anything to her.

He’s never **_stopped_** her.

He couldn’t stop her, she knows he couldn’t, all she has to do is call for him and he’d show up. She knows he would and he’s done it before, which is what she’s counting on when she sneaks out of the house the same way she sneaks out of her grandparents’ house ever summer. She makes sure to turn off the house phone, leave only the one in Joe’s office on and turn on all the lights just in case someone gets back before her. She even leaves her window open, leaves the curtains pulled though so no one notices.

Then she hops the fence because she doesn’t need any of her nosey ass neighbours asking her dad where she was going. She’s snuck through the backyard before, snuck out with Ollie and Bastian before, they all know which neighbours have dogs and they know which ones will actually look out their windows once in a while. She sticks to the fences for all of them, hops another fence and then she’s on another street, less people who know her here but she pulls up her hoodie.

She isn’t going far, the park isn’t that far from her house, a ten minute walk at most but she doesn’t want anyone at all noticing her. She takes twenty instead and circles around until she finds the creaky gate that never gets cleaned because it’s under some trees. A Thursday afternoon isn’t the most popular day to go for a walk in the park and that’s what she’s counting on as she shoves the gate open and heads for a statue.

There’s a playground nearby but it’s still too hot for the kids to play on it and it’s too early for any of the druggies to come out. She’s mostly alone by the statue, leaning against it and looking up at the sky, swallowing hard as she thinks about what she’ll say. She didn’t even warn him she might not be coming to visit, she hasn’t tried to call him, she’s spent months forcing herself to not even think the name because she isn’t sure if that’d be enough to call him.

She hopes he won’t be mad.

“Chin Chin.”

 -0-

“She’s not there, my lord,” the lycra reports and Chin Chin has to force himself not to tear the thing to pieces. Good servants are hard to find, ones who can travel all the realms are even harder and ones who aren’t terrified of humans almost don’t exist. They’re all so scared of touching a human and being dragged beyond the veil, even if most lycra spirits can’t be killed like that and the last time a human even touched a spirit was billions of chromosomes ago.

Honestly Chin Chin doesn’t know how half of these fools remember that, they don’t even remember when his Temple was new and whole but they remember spirits who died. He doesn’t understand why any of them even care about the captain, none of them knew him personally and the only one who did moved on. Chin Chin doesn’t understand weaker spirits, he really doesn’t and he doesn’t understand why Isabella isn’t home.

…well not home but, he doesn’t understand why she’s not here. Why she hasn’t visited her grandparents yet, why she hasn’t called him. Is she okay? Is she safe? Did something else happen with her father and the woman he married? Did something happen to her brothers?

He wants to go looking, just to make sure but he won’t do  that, he can’t do that to her. He can send his servants, have them search the realms for one of the few humans who pass through, have them posted in every realm just in case she stumbles into one. She’s smart, she knows how to get into a realm, she knows how to push through the thinnest places between two pieces and find her way to a halfway realm. She’s like Franklin’s little mortal, both of them have a habit of getting mixed up with dangerous spirits and dangerous realms.

He almost wants to go to Franklin, ask him if his mortal has said anything about Isabella. He knows the boy is friends with his girl, they talk, they played together, they’re friends. Chin Chin knows Franklin would report it to Francis, go running off to his relative who isn’t exactly a relative and tell him all about what the dark god’s up to. He almost doesn’t care, not if he gets what he wants, it would be worth it to find out where Isabella Gwen is.

He never expected to miss her this much, to miss her company, to miss her little offerings and her talking. He never realised how much she filled up the boring days until she didn’t show up to do it and he wonders if this is the kind of attachment he should let himself have. Oh but it’s much too late now, isn’t it? To break off contact with her, to forget her. He’s already obsessed with his interesting little human child and all he can do now is look after her as long as she’ll let him.

“She’s in the technologic realm,” the lycra adds after a while and he can hear the tremor in the thing’s voice. The only reason this one even went to the halfway realm was because it’s _more_ afraid of him than any human, even death, it knows what Chin Chin can and will do. None of them know why he’s been seen hunting around the edges of the technologic realm, none of them know who the human with him is, why there’s a human with him at all.

They think he’s getting ready for a war again, they think he wants humans on his side this time so they can fight the spirits. They’re all idiots because none of them are vulnerable to a human’s touch, none of them understand **_why_** exactly human things can drag a spirit through the veil. They’ve all forgotten, which is sad, so much gets forgotten between the wars he and Francis have but that’s not his problem. He doesn’t care.

“Ore wa chin chin ga daisuke,” he growls and the lycra doesn’t even bother bowing before it scrambles away. He hears it slip, fall, he smells blood so thick and silver and the lycra doesn’t even stop as it runs away, back to the realm it haunts. He can’t remember the last time a lycra formed, it’s been so long, and the ones left over from the last war are so timid and cowardly nowadays.

“O Chin Chin,” he hums, maybe he _should_ start gathering an army again, time to cull the herd. Maybe he should rock the omniverse again, him and Francis, remind them all who really has the power here and force change on the stagnating realms. A healthy omniverse is one that’s constantly changing after all, he’d only be doing his part raising hell and watching all the pretty things they built come crashing down on their heads.

“Ore wa,” he breathes, licking his lips as he remembers the last time he got to rip into armies, got to feel blood sticky and wet over all of his hands. Isabella might even want to see, he’d give her the best seat in the house, let her watch everything crumble to dust.

* * *

 

When they get the call, she wants to call dad back and demand he say it’s all a joke. She wants him to say ‘just kidding GG!’ the way he does now, GG, he calls her that. She knows Sebastian and Oliver want him to say it’s a joke too because well, they’ve always been closer to Brenda and she just wants her family to stay together. Her wanting it to happen doesn’t mean it will though, just like her wanting it to be a joke didn’t happen either.

Their grandparents let them all process it however they want, they don’t say much but she thinks maybe, just maybe, they were both expecting this someday. They haven’t seen their son, her dad, as long as IG and her brothers have been alive but they still know him. She wonders if they’ve been counting down the years since their grandchildren have been coming to visit them.

The sun’s just starting to dip by the time she stumbles through the forest to the shrine, after spending all morning with Kohe and Oliver. Sebastian fucked off somewhere, they’re fifteen now and they can go walking around if they want, Sebastian wants to the most and she knows it’s cause he has some girl he likes here. She hears him sometimes when she goes to the bathroom, talking to someone, and someday she’ll figure out who it is.

Today though, today’s for pretending some things don’t exist or happen. Today she’s holding a togepi plushy she bought in the airport and she’s putting it on the shrine. She’s asked about the shrine before, lots of times, Stanley’s lived here all his life and he doesn’t know who it’s for, her dad admitted to finding it once but he doesn’t know what it’s for either. She wants to laugh because she knows, now she knows and she sits in front of it while she waits.

“Ore wa,” he says as he walks through the trees and she waves even though he can’t see it, he can probably sense it though because he raises a hand to her too. She smiles weakly as she watches him come closer, watches the little flock of disembodied hands bobbing around him and watches his legs bend the wrong way a few times. She wonders if he looks like this for her now, if he thinks looking any other way will scare her off.

“My parents are getting a divorce, splitting up,” she tells him when he finally gets to the shrine, as he grabs the plushy and squeezes it. He settles down on his haunches in front of her, one knee bending the wrong way; he’s turning the plushy over and over in his hands but she knows he’s listening to her.

“They might decide to take some of us with them, I hope dad gets me,” she adds because she does, she wants to stay with her dad. He’s the one who helped her pick out a new name and he’s the one who started calling her GG and IG because those were easier to get used to. Sure Brenda, Brenda not mom, wasn’t terrible about her little boy actually being a little girl but Brenda doesn’t get it.

IG actually has no idea how Joe does, maybe he just knows more people, maybe he’s actually pan or something and never told them. All she knows is her dad has been supporting her as much as he can and she really loves him for it, even if he messes up sometimes and almost calls her DG instead of IG. She can forgive that though because he always corrects himself, every single time, and it’s better than Bastian and Ollie.

“And I hope he gets the house, I like my room,” she mutters, picking at some grass and throwing it in the air. She kind of wants to visit another realm, one of the cool ones, or maybe one of the dangerous ones but she also doesn’t. She doesn’t know what she wants to do.

“Ore wa,” Chin Chin says again, throwing the plushy in the air and catching it with another set of hands. She watches him throw and catch the plushy, batting it in the air and keeping it there, switching out hands as he goes so it’s a circle of them with the plushy in the middle. She actually has no idea what he does with the things she gives him, maybe he keeps them in a pile somewhere in his realm. Or maybe human things are really valuable and he sells them, she thinks about that for a little while, him selling a togepi plushy for something ridiculous like diamonds and gold.

“Brenda can have Sebastian, he’s her favourite,” she sighs because well she’s always known Sebastian was Brenda’s favourite. He’s the eldest and he’s the one that takes after her the most, acts like her the most, sometimes he even sounds just like her and it’s weird. IG doesn’t think she minds though, she’s never been close to Brenda the way Seb has been and she doesn’t think she ever will be.

“O Chin Chin,” Chin Chin nods solemnly at her then bats the plush at her and smacks her right in the face.

-0-

“I want you to call me Isabella Gwen now, and call me she, because I am. I’m a girl, okay?”

He cocks his head to the side as he tries to understand what the human said. He doesn’t understand some of it and knows he won’t be understood if he asks them to repeat, humans don’t understand his language. So he just sits back and pieces the sentences together while his mortal stands there.

The child hasn’t come back since the gryphon and Chin Chin thought maybe for a second the child finally learned better. No though, no, it’s here again and it’s so strange because he’s relieved. He’s glad the child came back, that the child brought some new soft thing for him and offered it on his shrine. He’s glad the child still speaks to him even after he showed what he really was.

“I know it’s confusing but I’m Isabella Gwen and I’ve thought about it a lot over the last few months when we didn’t see each other but I know what I’m talking about, okay?”

Less words this time but spoken just as quick but he was expecting it this time, heard the sharp little breath of air and the hard swallow. He cocks his head the other way as he considers his human, Isabella now. He knows humans put so much stock in what they are, man or woman, lord or peasant, from this country or that, the Gods they worship. He doesn’t understand it, none of them have real power and none of them worship any Gods worth the effort but…

But he can hear Isabella Gwen’s heart racing away, beating hard and fast, he can hear Isabella Gwen’s breath coming hard and he knows this matters to her. This matters to the strange mortal who isn’t afraid of a dark god or spirits or dead, ravaged realms. Sometimes he thinks he’s found every interesting, impossible thing about this little human child and then he’s thrown when something else comes bursting out.

He wonders if someday Isabella Gwen will show up understanding his language, if she’ll tell him exactly what he is and where he came from and tell him she wants to visit the past just because she can. He wonders if he should have ever brought this strange mortal into his world, shown her what he has, taught her as much as he has and if this is his own destruction come to meet him. Oh sure now she’s too weak to do anything, too human still but she wouldn’t be the first human to grow beyond herself.

“Chin Chin?” she asks, hesitantly, almost as though she’s afraid to break him out of whatever thought he’s lost himself in. He tips his head down towards her, huffs a breath and nods. He knows she wouldn’t understand him even if he said her name, knows she doesn’t understand his sign language because he uses too many hands and doesn’t know any other way to do it. He knows all they have are mutual, wordless understandings and gestures but she’s smart, she’s proved that over and over.

“Ore wa chin chin ga daisuki,” he tells her, wishes he could tell her in English ‘Hello Isabella Gwen, you are an incredible human and I am glad to know you’. Wonders if she’d believe he could be glad about anything, wonders if he would’ve believed it a few chromosomes ago either. Strange human child, changing him. Maybe he should have killed her the first time she saw him, or maybe the second, the third, stopped her finding him a fourth.

“That’s good right?”

He snickers as he nods again, he really does like her, his strange little human who never trusts too much. A good head on her shoulders and that’s why she’ll never lose it.

* * *

 

He doesn’t go back to the shrine for the rest of the Summer, he spends his time with Kohe and learning some of the most basic scales on the keyboard. He spends his time with his brothers, he spends his time with his grandparents, he doesn’t go back to the shrine behind the house in the little piece of woods. Dylan’s not afraid, he’s fucking not but at the same time, well at the same time he doesn’t know what he is.

He’s never been afraid of Chin Chin, well okay that’s a lie. He nearly pissed himself at first but after that, after that he’s only been really really curious, a little obsessed maybe. He’s spent hours online searching for anything and finding absolutely nothing and it doesn’t help that he can’t get a good picture of the shrine. Not with his phone camera, not with his dad’s camera that he begged and begged to borrow for the Summer so he could take pictures of cool things. He can’t even get the thing in a video because every time he tries, the footage never saves, the pictures always delete.

If he thought Chin Chin knew what a camera was, he’d ask about it, wouldn’t get an answer but at least he could’ve said he asked. He doesn’t know who he would have told but you know, it’s better than nothing.

Now he’s home though, home in America where strange spirits don’t wander through the and his neighbour doesn’t disappear for hours and he can’t sneak off at night to go chasing down some eldritch horror. He’s home, laying down on the trampoline and listening to the last of the summer as the moon rises, maybe he can even sleep out here tonight. He can pretend he’s in one of those realms, the dark ones that aren’t too dark and have impossible things living in them ready to tear out his throat and drink his blood and eat him…

“Stupid,” he mutters as he rolls over. He was stupid to go to that realm, the dark one, he should’ve known something was wrong with it when he got there and realised it was pitch black. He couldn’t see a foot in front of him, not even when he turned on his flashlight, he felt blind. He should have turned around and went home, or back to the shrine or the weird forest that was always stuck in dusk no matter the time in the place he came from.

Instead he stayed, stayed because he was so sure Chin Chin was there and when did he ever stop chasing Chin Chin? Looking back on it now, he knows, he definitely knows, Chin Chin tolerates him tagging along everywhere because the spirit could’ve gotten rid of him anytime he wanted. Nothing DG could’ve done would’ve been enough to stop Chin Chin, nothing he could ever do would be enough to stop something like Chin Chin.

Weird that it still doesn’t scare him, even knowing what his ‘friend’ is really capable of-actually no, even knowing what his ‘friend’ really **_is_** doesn’t scare him. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget it, the way the whole place just burst into light, hard white light that hurt to look at. The way the thing pinning him down screamed, shrieked, he doesn’t know if it was terrified or in pain or just startled.

He’ll never know what the thing thought, he doesn’t think he ever will because the one thought in his head, the only thing he could think as Chin Chin ripped the thing off him was “Amazing”. And he’s pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to think that, ever. He knows it’s not the right reaction when something so black, something so impossibly **_huge_** , and shapeless and not animal and not human… _exists_.

Something like Chin Chin shouldn’t _exist_.

He wants to think he’s crazy, that he hallucinated it all because he was so scared and so close to being killed and eaten. He wants to think he’s crazy, that he’s never been to another realm, that he’s just so lonely during the summers that he goes into the woods and dreams up things that he somehow convinced himself are real. He wants to think he’s crazy, that he’s in some kind of coma and this is his brain trying to break him out of it finally but no.

His fingers find the scar on his hip, the one from where the thing knocked him around, claws raking over his skin as it played with him. Batting him around, back and forth across the ground like a cat with a mouse, it hadn’t bled too much but the scars are there.

And if he closes his eyes, he can see Chin Chin. See the mass of black, of shadow or smoke or pure liquid darkness against the painfully bright light. He can see the hands moving in the darkness, so many of them, with fingers too long and spindly to be human, with too many joints, with claws on their tips instead of nails. He can see the teeth glinting in the light, too many rows of them, all the same hard white as the light except where little flecks of blood stood out nearly black.

And if he closes his eyes, he can see the face, the face with the mouth cram jam full of teeth, the face with sewn shut eyelids. And if he closes his eyes, he can see the silver thread snapping as the eyelids force themselves open. And if he closes his eyes, he can see more darkness, more shadows where eyes should be, where eyes haven’t been for more years than he could imagine.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget that, the face, the writhing darkness, the teeth and the claws. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget what Chin Chin really is but he doesn’t think it will ever scare him. God knows why but he wasn’t scared then and he doesn’t think he ever will be. He hopes he never will be because he doesn’t want to be.

 -0-

Chin Chin is used to reports of human children wandering around his realms now, Franklin has one which is strange enough and the one everyone calls his. He doesn’t correct them because he knows gossip doesn’t die but he wonders where they get the idea from. He doesn’t exactly take care of the strange child the way Franklin does, he doesn’t teach DG about the realms, he doesn’t even talk to the child not really.

Chin Chin goes on his patrols through his realms and the child finds him, somehow, the child always finds him somehow. He doesn’t know if it’s something in the blood, that family has been living on the edge of the omniverse for generations now and every so often one of them will find the places through the realms. Most of them get lost, some of them make it back home, more than a few die but none have ever attached themselves to him.

“O Chin Chin,” he snickers as DG stumbles into a nightmare looking for him. How long has it been since anything made it close to his own realm, his very own realm? He doesn’t really care to remember or check back the chromosomes, it’s been a time and that’s good enough for him.

He should have guessed DG would though, the child has an unerring sense for him and Chin Chin is tempted to see if the child can find his realm. To just wait patiently for the child to struggle out of the nightmare and deeper into the Dead realm that borders his. It might even be fun, there’s never anything interesting going on any more, not even Francis’ gay show and all the bullshit he does on it. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know what half the things Francis complains about are, the fucker steals so much from the technological realm these days it’s hard to keep up.

The child fights with the nightmare a bit, walking around in pitch blackness and probably giving up on finding the light. It’s funny to think the Dead realm the child is actually in is one of the few that has light, that it’s the brightest realm in the entire omniverse, full of hard, blazing light. Sometimes he wanders through and feels it on his back, almost burning him, almost searing his skin but never managing to really hurt. Nothing’s hurt in a while, everything’s just a little too weak, a little too far away, a little not enough.

He sighs as the nightmare clings to his human, he supposes he can call DG that, and he bats one of the soft things the child offered him before. He’s playing with the soft thing, half paying attention when he feels it, feels a shift in the realm, hears the crackle in the air and is moving before the shatter starts. He tears through his realm, and rips through another but the thing is already there, a gryphon, the largest he’s seen in chromosomes.

He can hear the beat of its wings, feel the gusts of wind even on the edge of the Dead realm and he can smell the…he can smell the blood on its talons. Human’s blood on its talons, **_his_** human’s blood on its talons.

The realm shakes as he rips through his lycra skin, as he spills out of it and across the Dead fields. He takes a step that’s more gliding that mechanical action and he’s above the gryphon, he’s above the nightmare and his child. The nightmare evaporates, dies on contact with his darkness, absorbed into something so much worse than it. The gryphon though, the gryphon shrieks, beats its wings as it tries to climb back into the air and soar away but oh no, no, no.

He rips the wings from its back and licks the blood off his fingers, he claws into its stomach and tears the innards from it. He wraps the ropes of meat around the creature’s neck and pulls, makes it a noose of its own flesh and dangles it high above the ground, lets its own jerking and fighting strangle it. He lets the gryphon hang itself and then to be sure, he snaps its neck and flings it away.

“Chin Chin?”

His attention snaps back to his child, his mortal. Bleeding, bleeding onto the hard, dry dirt of a Dead realm and he doesn’t know what to do. The child isn’t crying which is good but he doesn’t know what to do now, now that he’s shown DG what he is and there’s no screaming either. There’s silence which he isn’t used to with this child, he doesn’t think he likes it.

“Ore wa,” he whispers but it still echoes, he should fall back into his skin, fit himself back into it and take the child home.

“Thank God,” the child breathes, relieved, **_relieved_**! Chin Chin forces his eyes open, breaks the threads holding him just so he can stare at this child, show this child exactly what he is in his terrifying entirety.

“Thank _you_ ,” the child adds and Chin Chin feels his lips stretch into a smile.

* * *

 

“Ow,” DG whines as Stanley tapes the bandage over his nose, Stanley’s already asked him how he cut his nose but DG refuses to say. He’s not going to say that he was trying to climb over a fence and fell on his face, Bastian and Olli would laugh their heads off at him and he’s not about to let that happen. Plus, if he tells them he’s been climbing the fence, they won’t let him do it anymore and he wouldn’t be able to go walking with Chin Chin.

He’s wasted nearly all summer and last summer getting the spirit to trust him, chasing him over the fence nearly every single night and through the realms. Chin Chin finally started waiting up for him, hanging from trees while he fought his way through underbrush or lounging on the opposite river bank while DG tried to figure out a way across. Chin Chin doesn’t shush him anymore either, when he asks questions or just starts talking in general, it’s nice and DG doesn’t want to mess that up.

“Hold still,” Stanley, Stanley not grandpa or pop or papa or any of those, tells him and he tries to hold as still as he can. He still doesn’t really know his grandparents, his dad’s parents, his mom’s parents died when he was too little to remember them and he doesn’t really know what to do with Mai and Stanley. He can see where dad got his looks sure and it’s nice to see the place dad grew up and it’s cool to learn more Japanese but he doesn’t really know how to feel about his grandparents.

Most of the time they’re watching tv or going to the store or whatever else they used to do before the triplets got there. DG’s pretty sure he knows the neighbour kid better than them, Kohe, really quiet and can’t hang out every day but nice. Oh and sure he can spend all day with his brothers too, dad let them bring their games and sometimes Mai will take them in to town or she’ll take them to a city where there are way too many people but awesome stores and that’s cool.

Mai probably spoils them and mom will probably hate how many games they’re coming back with this year. Games and clothes and sweets and books, DG’s pretty sure Mai is trying to get her son to move back home by spoiling his kids and sending them back with a whole bunch of reminders of _his_ home. He doubts it’ll happen because dad always gets this sour look on his face whenever anyone mentions him coming with them next summer but Mai’s probably hoping.

Stanley smiles when he finishes up and pats DG on the shoulder before he goes back to doing whatever he was doing. It could be cool to have dad there with them, DG could probably even convince him to stay up late one night and watch for Chin Chin. Oh sure the spirit doesn’t show up every night but when he does, he walks around the backyard then climbs over the fence to visit the neighbours then back over and back into the forest.

Sometimes he thinks about asking Kohe if **_he’s_** ever seen anything because Kohe’s been coming here longer right? He’s been spending summers with his aunt since he was little, Kohe had to have seen something at least once right? Maybe, maybe not, maybe Kohe’s so quiet because he saw something once and it scared him so much he doesn’t speak when he’s back here.

Or maybe he’s just shy, DG knows what being shy is like but his shyness is the kind that makes him talk and talk and talk. Dad says he should slow down once in a while, let someone else talk but he can never stop himself and Kohe never seems to mind. Neither does Chin Chin these days which is nice, which is good. He knows he bothers the spirit trailing after him at night but he can’t help himself and at least now Chin Chin seems used to him.

Doesn’t mean he should stop bringing gifts though, the gifts at least give the spirit a reason to not hate him. He should carry something tonight, because that’s how it goes, he waits until he sees the spirit then he climbs over the fence and finds the shrine. If Chin Chin is still around, he can leave his gift on the shrine and wait for the spirit to appear, if the spirit doesn’t then he goes looking.

He doesn’t think he’ll have to go looking tonight.

 -0-

 Chin Chin huffs as he hears the human child stumble into the realm again. He should probably put a stop to this before the child teaches anymore stupid humans how to get through but he doesn’t really want to. The child is interesting…DG? He thinks that’s the name the child prattled off the other night but he’s not the best with names.

DG is interesting, such a strange human who decides following after him while he makes his patrols is fun. He doesn’t even go to very interesting realms, most of them are Dead realms, the rest are Ravaged and anything left over is a halfway realm like the forest itself. There’s nothing appealing about any of them, oh some may look beautiful but there’s nothing more than plants and a few sunsets to look at. Some of them don’t even have ruins but they’re all his and he visits them on a moon basis, always keeping to his schedule to make sure the chromosomes don’t shift.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever understand these human children who get lost in halfway realms and latch onto the spirits they find. Oh of course he knows about the other one, the one tailing after a lonely spirit, at least that’s somewhat understandable. The spirit encourages the child, he doesn’t want to spend his time watching the banal sunsets or getting chased out of places he should never go. The child there is something to stave off the crippling loneliness, something to make the days different, maybe even worth living.

But Chin Chin, oh he’s not some sad little spirit haunting a dead realm, no, he’s a God, and he owns so much, can go so many places. He doesn’t need to spend a second thought on the irritatingly persistent human child who breaks into his realms and tails after him like a little pet. He doesn’t need to listen to the chatter and rambling that goes on and on and on, half the time he has no idea what the child is talking about and the other half well, it’s a little interesting. He’ll admit, he’ll give the child, at least DG has some interesting questions.

Questions about the realms they pass through, even though Chin Chin won’t ever answer, can’t really because the child doesn’t understand his language. If he cared though, the answers wouldn’t be simple or anything the child would actually understand but sometimes thinking up the answers is…not frustrating. Sometimes the questions the child asks aren’t ones he’s ever heard before or about things he’s never bothered himself with and it’s nice to see his realms from such a different perspective.

The child doesn’t have context, doesn’t know who or what he is, the child doesn’t know what a chromosome is, the child doesn’t even know what the omniverse but to be fair not many do. Oh some think they know but they only know part of an answer and Chin Chin could never be fucked to fill them in. He thinks he’d rather answer the child’s questions, about why this realm is stuck in dusk, why that realm never has rain, why this one is flooded, how come animals don’t live here?

So many questions, even questions about the people. What happened to the people or would it be spirits? How many types of spirits are there? Are there any more like you? What kind are you? Do you have a family? Were you ever human? What happens if a human gets lost here? Is your name Chin Chin or is the only thing you can say? What were you doing in the yard that night? How come you don’t stop me from coming back here?

He thinks he could spend a full month answering the child’s questions and there would still be more at the end of it all. It’s frustrating and annoying and not in the least bit endearing and he hasn’t spent any kind of time wondering how he could answer the questions when neither of them speaks the other’s language. He hasn’t thought about getting a translator, some little lycra who’d be too scared to try to hurt the child but not too scared to speak.

He hasn’t thought about that, at all. The child is an annoyance and it’s one he’s going to deal with, very soon. He swears.

* * *

 

Tomi watches him most nights, sips her tea and watches the spirit creep through the yard.

Chin Chin. How long has it been since she met him? Fifteen years? Twenty? She doesn’t remember exactly when she first saw him creeping through her yard in the half moonlight, never the full moon, never the new moon, always the half-moon. Sometimes she’d see him under a waxing crescent, sometimes under waning, and she’s come to rely on him to tell her the moon phases. She relies on him for a lot these days.

Her ‘nephew’ is asleep in his bed as she watches the spirit and the neighbour kid is probably waiting for the second he’s over the fence to go dashing out. She thinks about warning them sometimes, being the guiding voice she never had and warning them about all the things out there. She almost wants to tell them a story, about three friends who found something they shouldn’t have and who did things they shouldn’t have and lost things they shouldn’t have for things they shouldn’t have wanted.

Kohe, well Kohe, Kohe might be her fault. She…she’s not his mother, she never could be his mother and Misaki is his father in name only. They both know that, he doesn’t love his son, he barely tolerates his son and the only reason he even has a child is because of what he shouldn’t have wanted. Meanwhile, she lives alone, she’ll always live alone except for when this amazing child visits her and reminds her of her own stupidity.

She should stop him, put a lock on the gate one of these days but she thinks he’d start climbing just like the neighbour kid. She could tell him what his father did to get where he is, deals with the devil oh it sounds bad even thinking it but it’s not exactly what everyone expects. Mainly because the devil is different than what people think, he doesn’t want souls, he doesn’t put twists on his deals. He wants different things from different people, things they’re more than willing to give up so long as they get what they want.

Tomi smiles as she takes another sip of her tea, she wonders how Joseph is doing, all the way in America, sending his children back to maybe make the same mistake he did. She never did learn what his deal was, she always knew Misaki’s because well, they loved each other, didn’t they? Her and Misaki, all through their boyhood years, back when she wasn’t Tomi and before he met the woman he’d marry.

Sometimes she thinks she loved him more than platonically but not quite romantically either. Sometimes it’s better to pretend time is just playing tricks on her and go back to her life.

Chin Chin climbs back over the neighbour’s fence and Tomi waits to see the kid creep out, one of the triplets. She has no idea why Chin Chin lets the kid follow him, she has no idea why he never offered to make a deal with this one, the kid is definitely old enough but no there’s nothing, there’s no deal. She thinks that’s odd, thinks maybe the old God’s going weak, or maybe he’s just working up to something worse.

The kid picks his way across the yard, scrambles up the fence and is gone in less than five minutes, a shadow in the moonlight. Tomi watches a little while longer, glances at the trees beyond her own fence and thinks about what Kohe could be doing all day in those halfway realms. She knows he found a spirit too, something not as dangerous as Chin Chin but she doesn’t know what, she doesn’t think she ever will.

She gave up her chance to learn about that world, they all did, all three of them. When they made their deals and paid their dues, they made sure they could never, ever learn about any world but their own. Oh sure they could still see the spirits, hear them, meet them even, but it could only ever be at the spirit’s leisure. They could never go to a halfway realm, find an old shrine, crawl and shove and push their way through the thin spaces between the realms.

Tomi almost regrets it, when she sees Kohe running off to visit his friend, when she sees Joseph’s kid scrambling over a fence, she feels nostalgic and jealous and exhausted all at once. These kids, they want things they can probably never have and she remembers what that was like. They have things no kid should ever want and she still knows what that’s like but, but they’re different.

These two, they aren’t three friends who want things they shouldn’t, these two want things no one else has ever thought to want and Tomi’s almost scared to see how it all plays out. She doesn’t think she can handle more heartbreak in her life but there’s something, something almost irresistible about knowing.

She finishes her tea just as a cloud bank rolls in, she’s washing the mug as it starts to rain and she falls asleep remembering what it was like to be young and to offer things to a shrine.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in the exact same format it's read, meaning I wrote my way backwards through the fic with very little planned out except for main plot points. I hope I did okay with this backwards linear narrative.


End file.
